Automating verification of sent EMAIL/SMS messages

Question

I have been doing some research about how to do verification automation on sent emails - but haven't really found anything that has worked thus far.

Here is what I need to test:

We have a customer portal where our customer service reps set a "Template" to be used for email and SMS communications. I am tasked with verifying that the email/SMS that is sent from us is received at our customers inbox with customer data and styling being the same.

Our team has internal API's that I can use to execute the JSON requests to send the communications. Personally I have attempted to test this with Selenium by logging into a Gmail account and verifying the text that comes into the email, but it doesn't really check for the stylistic viewing of the email in the inbox. I haven't found any suitable SMS platform to see text messages. Any help on this issue would be appreciated.

Update:

Manual testing is not an option because we have 20 or so communication types and about 10 templates in each one. It takes a lot of time to test manually, so it really is a good candidate for automation with our small-er test team

Answer 1

Another similar service is mailosaur.

Along with an API you can use to retrieve SMS (still beta as of September 2020) and emails, you can also use a number of packages/modules for a variety of testing frameworks.

An example in TestCafe:

import config from '../config';
import { customAlphabet } from 'nanoid';
import axios from 'axios';
import Newsletter from '../Objects/newsletter';

async function request (reqObject) {  
    try {
        return await axios(reqObject);            
    } catch (error) {
        console.error(error);
    }
}

function serverId () {
    return process.env.MAILOSAUR_SERVER_ID;
}

function mailosaurFullEmail (id) {
    return (id ? id : nanoid()) + '.' + serverId() 
        + '@' + config.mailosaurDomain;
}

fixture `Newsletter`    
    .page(baseUrl);

test             
    ('Sign Up For Newsletter', async t => {

        const id = (customAlphabet('1234567890', 10))();

        await t
            .typeText(Newsletter.newsEmailInput, mailosaurFullEmail(id))
            .click(Newsletter.consent)
            .click(Newsletter.sendButton);

        let res = await request({
            method: 'POST',
            url: config.mailosaurUrlEmail + serverId(),
            headers: {
                'Authorization': 'Basic ' 
                    + Buffer.from(process.env.MAILOSAUR_API_KEY)
                        .toString('base64'),
                'Content-Type': 'application/json'
            },
            data: {
                sentTo: mailosaurFullEmail(id)
            }
        });       
        
        await t
            .expect(res.status).eql(200);
});

and the relevant config values:

{
    "mailosaurUrlEmail": "https://mailosaur.com/api/messages/await?server=",
    "mailosaurDomain": "mailosaur.io"
}

This endpoint will return 200 OK if the message was found and 204 if not.

Answer 2

For (automated) testing of email content I have used mailtrap.io in the past.

I think you can use ClickSend for receiving SMS (and email) messages.

Both have an API to send/receive and parse messages send to their service. So you should be able to programmatically test that SMS/Email is send/received and check the content.

Answer 3

I was able to accomplish this by using swiftpigeon.io It worked great for automating flows with the API's they have. As well as manual testing via the UI dashboard they offer. They even offer free accounts for email testing only.